


Anemophilia

by orphan_account



Category: The Tempest - Shakespeare
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 04:00:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/605592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ariel is older than Prospero might guess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anemophilia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Allothi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allothi/gifts).



In th

e

old 

 

days

 

in the o

lddays

 

 

NO. Stop that. Concentrate. 

 

In the old days. In the old days they came from the east. It was nothing more than a breath at the tip of the island but they fascinated it and it curled their sails towards its rocks. A ragged, refugee mess of a fleet - it'd give words to what it was later, but then the boats were mere dead trees stuck together with cotton and iron and with breathing bodies on top. They scratched their crafts on his shores and put their leather-shod feet on the sand and it knew them, knew their ways, knew that they fled a distant horror and pain but the fleeing was almost more painful than the memory. They had a half-starved bull on one of the crafts and they led it out and it watched with its chin in its palm as the poor bony thing stumbled in the sand. It huffed and snorted and yes, led them up the beach, onto the plain, where there was the stream, cool and free from brine. 

They cheered. And then they slit its throat into the water. They cracked open its sternum. One old woman plunged her hands into its chest. She had gold around her neck and ears and wrist and when she jabbed the wet heart into the sky the beads jangled like rain. 

The blood sparked something in the back of its not-full-formed mind. The salt was not attractive, nor the copper - there were rings of copper down deep under the earth. What it meant. Thanks. Not a gift, but a payment. The price of the island.

It appeared on the banks in a whipping gust and touched the bull's wet neck. The people surrounding went limp and crashed to the ground on their knees. Howled. Trembled. It felt itself sharpening. The sea-salt air that was its body formed fingers, hands, head. Like the creatures kneeling. It licked its fingers and stared at them. The old woman, on her knees, began to cry out. She had gold around her neck and ears and wrists and when she tossed her head to the sky the beads jangled like the rain. 

Aiolos, she said. Io, teos. Io, Panhyparkos Aiolos.

Name. At the naming it sharpened again. Mind, body, soul. It felt the two hundred bodies kneeling on its banks and it raised them up, a gust of wind licking their wounds, and showed them, flash in their eyes, the bounty of the island. The mushrooms growing on the cliff. The birds' eggs. The pines dripping with nuts, the honey in the branches, the ripe fruit dangling in the groves and the jackals chasing rabbits in and out of the caves. 

Io, teos, they repeated, and it was good.

They built. They were careful. First they dismantled half their boats, the rotten ones, and made lean-tos mortared with mud over the cavemouths. They brewed honey wine, crushed juice from the fruit trees, laid out jugs of saltwater in the sun so after a few hours there would be only salt. For its part it kept the seas calm, it scared birds from the branches so they could put slim arrows through their chests. It let the jackals hunt as they would but called them away from the boards drying fish and rabbitskins in the sun. It watched them hew a block of obsidian from the cliff, watched them pull little flakes of gold from the stream where the bull died. Watched the old, men and women both, pick shells and mushrooms from the beach. Ships came, one or two at frst and then so many they had to build a dock. They offered gold flakes, pine nuts, wine, wooden amulets carved with its face, got silver and hides and goats in return.

When the day and night were equidistant from each other it  settled softly in the tree above the altar. T. The old woman with her jangling-rain beads led the girl bedecked in shells to the fire and the girl would drink he honey wine with mushrooms pounded in. The old woman lifted a stone cut sharp as ice. For a moment it was not alone in the tree, it had a girl of matchless loveliness entwining her arms around it. Had her lifting her heart to its parted lips.

They made it into him, and their familiarity blurred it into something new. Panhyperarkos Aiolos, Arkos Aiolos, Arkaiolos, Araiolos.

"Ariel," they cried, and the old woman (a different one, had been different for ten years, and the twenty years before that) flashed a silver knife in the night air.

They made him into human form, lofty and distant but close at hand. He might laugh with his people. He might dance in the dark with the old woman, make her remember the days when she might have been laid out for her wedding on the altar. He was not sly - slyness was for deeper forests, ones not so salt-scarred, and sometimes a leaf-green imp from the mainland came and loved him in a way that man could not. He was the sea, and the wind, and the night. Jackal-slayer, gold-god, a lover of beauty. Gold and blood and magic. A wonderful time.

But one night, a foul wind from the east. The trees rocked. Ash and fire. From the east! He supposed there were old gods there, infuriated by the pilgrims that had so long ago braved the seas to scratch upon his lonely shore. A boiling sea, far-distant thunder. Grey sky. Try as he might he could not cast away the clouds, nor could he mete out magic so others could. He drummed up the isle's lesser spirits but nothing, nothing. The ash stayed. Choked the sky. Choked him. They laid out their grey-skinned daughters on the altar and he tried to comfort them from his perch in the dying tree. but they pushed him away, their deathbright eyes full of betrayal. The fire stopped but the ash grew thicker and the dead fish made the beach an echo of the caves. The sun refused to reappear. Frost followed fire.

The girl-givers starved. Regretted letting their daughters give their hearts. He tried to help. He tried. He sailed off far and fought other lesser gods to blow a flock of sea-geese over his people's sky, or to wash up fresher fish into their nets, but it was not enough. They had shaped him into a human and he mourned with them, mourned his failure, but his sympathies could not assuage their hunger. They broke the altar, cut down his pines, built boats. 

Left.

Thet raders who'd bought amulets with his face soon forgot them. The story of the isle east of the bull-worshipers faded. He could feel himself fading, feel himself crawling to nothingness. The two hundred years'-worth of girls stared at him, accusing, but with no one to remember them they faded too. It was only him left to scratch the shores. Only him. 

Him. But no one to make him. He faded. The years crawled by and  _he_ faded. It. Back. Formless. Mind cracking into sharp. tiny. shards. No one to listen. It rode the winds as it always did, summoned storms, but nothing. nothing. nothing.

Until.

She. Big-bellied. Copper-skinned. Eyes a sharp and incongrous blue. Stumbled out of her craft coughing for water. She put her feet on the sand and paused. She tilted her head. She let her cracked lips fold into a smile.

It watched her, not daring to hope.

She dragged a second body from my boat - took a while, damn her swollen belly - and carried him to a place away from the wave. Not far, though, didn't have the strenght of a starved bull.  She broke a shell against a rock. She slit his dead throat and squeezed his neck so the thick rotten blood would stain the sand. She sat splay-legged with her poor offer and called into the salt-stained air. 

And io, teos, that blood tasted sweet. It - he - appeared. All the island a-hum, staring at her, staring at the body she brought. He appeared next to her. He hungered.

She looked him straight in the eyes, touched the shell to her lips.

"Tell me where," she said.

He led her to the north tip of the island. The pines had recovered by now, a few thousand years after that furious stripping. The broken altar worn away by rain and himself but its shape still recognizable. He laid the body out for her; she put her hand on the altar, listening to its tales, and smiled. An old rock-knife pounded against the dead man's bones. He gorged on the heart and when he was done he led her by the hand to where the waterfall met the stream. As she drank he collected for her fruit. She sat back and regarded him with her knife-sharp eyes.

"What is your name, spirit?"

_I am the most high guardian of the winds. I am the sea, the wind, and the night. I am the jackal-slayer, the gold-god, a lover of beauty._

"Ariel," Ariel said. "I am Ariel, and I am the god of this island."

"Praise be to you, Ariel," the woman said, and made her calloused hand into an O. He felt something snap around him, a metal band, not soft like copper but hard like the nails in the boats. "I am Sycorax, and I am the goddess of you."

He hated her.

But he didn't. He couldn't. A few weeks ina nd this was just like before except she made no expectation of loyalty. She paid for what he gave her, haggled the price but paid. She fed him rabbit blood, jackal hearts, and after he held her back straight through a thrashing birth she let him devour the blood from her afters. The child's blood tasted odd, more like the imp from the mainland than any of the young women embracing him in the tree. She would not speak of its parentage. She only loved it, fiercely. She dappled its nostrils with mushroom spores and sewed beads to its wrists as it slept. It had copper eyes and thick dark hair and its beads protected it from jackals.  Ariel mostly ignored it.

The woman was a witch and might have been the start of a god herself if not that she'd been tossed away in horror by the men of her land. What crime, he knew not; he could not see inside her mind like he could the girl-givers. She made her own power, though, and thus rarely needed him. Only to rise a gutting, spitting tempest to fright away the boats from the south shore. Only to, once, beach a whale upon the shore, and then to butcher it, and then to spend a day wind-drying its poor corpse. she asked about the ones before but did not go to dig up their bones. She was unobstrusive. Untouchable.

The child, though.

Jackal hearts and rabbit blood did not power him like man's blood. Could not. If he ate the child's heart, he could burst his bonds, destroy the witch, lure a second generation of gold and blood and magic onto the isle, so he might be glutted and they might be enriched. He felt no hate for the boy, nor for the woman. They were, quite simply, not enough. He latched his teeth into the boy's arm and a spark dark and black hatred shot through him and he was thrown back. He woke up sticky with pine-sap. Choked on it.

"I don't need you," came Sycorax' voice sailing through the knotholes. He tried to beat upon the bark but the sap stuck him close. "Murder my son, would you? I shan't call myself arrogant enough to kill a god, but nor should you."

The pine closed fast. Squeezed. He screamed.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. Except it was worse this time because he couldn't fade. Sycorax called to him often, pointed out the tree to her little son, who was growing swift to a man, and who had another strain of power to him, separate from that of his mother, different from the old women with their jangling beads and knives. A red power. A dark power. Not evil, just black and red and hot, and he could sing to the birds in the trees better even than Ariel.

He felt the tree crack one morning and hoped he could flee, but no, it was not the tree cracking, it was the magic around it fossilizing. it was the child crying, Mama, mama, wake up. The tree cracked again but before he could jump out Caliban had him with a bind round his neck.

"Wake up my mother," he said. In the time between Ariel's entrapment and now his mother's son had become a beautiful boy, long hair he twisted in knots further twisted into braids and those into a knot like a jellyfish. muscled, copper eyes streaked here and htere with jet, full lips, long lashes. If he had set his heart on the altar Ariel would not have let him leave the tree. "Wake her."

"She's dead."

"I don't care. You can do something. You're a god. "

Ariel was feeling cruel. "She said she was one too."

The pinetree snapped back shut. Ariel curled around in the sap and listened to Caliban howl.

-

Now. Snap. Had the son died, would he be stuck here forever? But the snap and crack was of the soul of the motehr falling litle a crushed shell around the roots. The bark split. Burst. He fled the tree, a rocket, a star, in love with the air, and then he was flung back to earth. Sap dried on his skin.

A man stood there, a book in one hand, a little child holding the other. She had long hair. Caliban was nearby, Ariel could feel him, but he was asleep, probably didn't know these creatures were here.

"You," said the man, "are you a spirit of this isle?"

"Ai. Teos Pankyperarkos."

The man squinted. "You do not seem highest to me."

"Oh, but I am." Ariel rose, arms spread, winds gusting. The tiny girl cowered. "I am most high guardian. I am the sea, the wind, the night. I am the jackal-slayer, the gold-god, a l - "

The band snapped around his soul. Ariel sat in his sap and looked up at the sky. The ash from a thousand years ago was all gone. The sky was black and star-stabbed. 

"Ariel," he said. "I am Ariel."

"Help us to find water, Ariel."

Ariel would have rather been back in the tree.

**Author's Note:**

> Forgive my terrible attempts at Greek. I'm sure I didn't decline it properly. I will excuse myself by claiming an invented ancient dialect. Io teos should mean something like "hail, god!" Panhyparkos Aiolos = truncated Panhyperarkos Aiolos = "keeper of the winds highest above all."


End file.
